Blog Day 370 - Saturday 03 April 202

The town is deserted, not because of another virus lockdown but because most of the population have fled to the beach or the country for the Easter long weekend.

Things are getting back to normal in some ways at the Shrine.  Although there are no international visitors and very few interstate visitors we are getting some locals coming through and should see some more of them over the school holidays.

However, it is great to see the school groups returning to the Shine after an absence of 12 months.  To date this year, which is really only two months we have had over 5,000 school students attend the Shrine on formal guided tours.  This is less than we would normally have visit but it is enough to keep us occupied.  This doesn't include ad hoc school groups and self guided school groups.  

Most weeks since we have been back I have done two one hour school tours.  Last Thursday afternoon I had a group of 25 or so grade 4 students from a northern suburbs christian school and a group of 12 year nine students from one of our elite girls schools.  Could not have got a greater contrast in groups if I had tried.

The grade 4 kids are great fun, lots of questions and answers and lots of involvement.  The kids of this age are fascinated by the "eternal flame", and they all want to know if it is real, can it burn you, what does it run on and the biggy, has it ever gone out.  Of course I tell them that if it went out it wouldn't be eternal.  They then come up with all sorts of scenarios as to what would put it out, rain, hail, wind, snow, hurricanes, earthquakes and various combinations of the above.  We could spend full tour standing around the eternal flame.

The year nines are a different kettle of fish, at least the group of year nines I had on Thursday was a smaller group and made it a bit easier to communicate with them.  They were nice girls, polite, but hard work to get any interaction with them.  This sort of behaviour is pretty typical of all the year nine groups no matter what school they come from.

We have also had two groups of RAN recruits from HMAS Cerberus tour the Shrine.  All the RAN recruits do a tour of the Shrine early in their recruit training.  These tours are usually handled by the weekend volunteers so I haven't had the pleasure of dealing with the junior matelots as yet.

Queensland has reported one more locally acquired infection, however it is a person who has been in home quarantine since attending a hot spot and has subsequently tested positive.  It would appear that Qld has handled this latest outbreak extremely well with rapid and effective contact tracing and isolation of contacts and possibly infected people.

Meanwhile the rest of the country is doing OK as well; all the zeros in Victoria; 3 new infections in NSW, all ROTs; 3 new infections in Qld, 2 of which are ROTs; all up 6 new cases Australia wide, 5 of which are ROTs.

In the last 24 hours Qld received the results of 26,000 tests on top of 35,000 the previous day; NSW 13,500 tests and Victoria 12,000 tests.

Currently Australia wide there are 151 active cases of which 143 are ROTs.  There is one active case in Victoria which is a ROT; 42 active cases in NSW of which 40 are ROTs and 74 active cases in Qld of which 68 are ROTs.

The only area that we appear to be falling down on is the rollout of the vaccine Australia wide.  This hasn't been helped by a Victorian man reported to have developed blood clots after being vaccinated with the AstraZeneca vaccine.  The TGA is looking into this and will report on it in due course.

The rollout of the vaccine in Australia is also caught up in a blame game between the states and the federal government, who knows where the real blame lies there.  I would have thought that by now there would be mass vaccination centres established as well as the roll out through GP clinics and the like.  Why aren't pharmacists involved in the roll out, my local pharmacist gave me my flu jab the other day.

COUNTRY	VACC	DOSES	per 100k
Israel		10,055,840	118,040
Seychelles		102,080	104,163
UAE		8,391,302	85,880
Chile		10,760,851	56,780
Bhutan		423,114	55,454
UK		35,660,902	52,807
Bahrain		775,196	47,239
USA		153,631,404	46,687
Monaco		18,081	46,362
Australia		710,067	2,817
New Zealand		68,666	1,436
Worldwide		617,027,408	7,99

The figures above are starting to get a trifle misleading because some countries are now well into the second round jabs.  Take for example the UK, they are shown above as administered 35 million doses however only 4.5 million UKers are fully vaccinated, or 6.65% of the population of 68 million.  

Israel has fully vaccinated (2 jabs) 55% of its population.

The WHO are only counting people who have received both jabs as being fully vaccinated.

Whichever way you count it they are still way ahead of Australia.

Worldwide the new daily infections continue to increase with 630,000 reported in the last 24 hours, the death figures are remaining reasonably constant with 11,376 reported in the last 24 hours.

The US daily infections are creeping back up with 78,000 reported in the 24 hours of 02/04 but deaths seem to have stabilised a little at 1,048 in the same 24 hour period.

The decline in daily rate of infection in the UK seems to have stalled a little with 4,600 new infections reported in the 24 hours of 02/04 however deaths are remaining low at 51 in the same 24 hour period.

Brazil reported 91,000 new infections in the last 24 hours and 3,769 deaths.  Have they just given up?  To date Brazil has fully vaccinated just 2.4% of its population.

A bit busy over the next couple of days so could be a bit of a break with the blog, but don't despair, as MacArthur said "I will return".